From [HERE] Thousands packed the sidewalks along Veterans Memorial Boulevard in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, watching the Krewe of Centurions Mardi Gras parade in March of 2019 when a brawl broke out at a nearby parking garage. More than two dozen men traded blows in a bloody melee that forced the parade’s 20-plus floats to grind to a halt.

Sheriff’s deputies quickly broke up the fight, arresting at least one man. As officers attempted to calm the crowd and shepherd them back to the parade route, Sgt. Keith Dowling claimed he saw someone hurling obscenities at his officers.

An “argumentative black male [was] agitating elements within the crowd by repeatedly yelling ‘Fuck You’ while gesturing with both middle fingers at responding deputies,” Dowling wrote in his incident report.

He identified the person in question as Jacobi Cage.

Cage’s presence at the parade is the only thing about that night that he and the officers agree on. Dowling, an eight-year veteran of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, said he tried to de-escalate the situation by quietly removing Cage from the scene, but the then-20-year-old became violent and swung “wildly” at him, hitting him in the chest. The sergeant stated in his report he had no choice at that point but to use force to take Cage to the ground, after which he booked Cage for battery of an officer and resisting arrest.

After spending several hours in the parish jail, Cage was released with a summons to appear in court. He returned to his home that night feeling angry and helpless. Cage, who’d been a football standout at Destrehan High School in neighboring St. Charles Parish until his graduation two years earlier, had never been in legal trouble before, but now he was facing up to six months in jail and a criminal record.

He tried to tell his family he was innocent. He said the deputies attacked and beat him for no reason, then falsely arrested him. But it was his word against that of the Sheriff’s Office, and for a young Black man in Jefferson Parish, a majority-white, conservative community just outside of New Orleans, that was a losing hand.

As Cage lay in bed that night, unable to sleep, he scrolled through his Twitter feed and noticed a video that had been taken at the parade. The tweet said: “man just recording got assaulted and arrested for nothing.” [MORE]